A world of difference

✍ Scribed by Barbara Johnson

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Year: 1987
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 245
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Is a willingness to carry an inquiry to the point of undecidability necessarily at odds with political engagement? In A World of Difference Barbara Johnson extends and rethinks the theoretical perspectives on literature opened up by her earlier book, The Critical Difference. Through subtle and probing analyses of texts by Wordsworth, Poe, Baudelaie, Mallarmé, Thoreau, Mary Shelley, Zora Neale HUrston, Gwendolyn Brooks, and others, she attempts to transfer the analysis of "difference" from the realm of linguistic universality or deconstructive allegory into contexts in which difference is very much at issue in the world. New to the paperback edition is a preface that readdresses the question of the politics of deconstruction in the context of current discussion about the life and works of Paul de Man.

✦ Table of Contents

Frontmatter
Preface to the Paperback Edition (page xi)
Acknowledgments (page xix)
Introduction (page 1)
PART ONE: THE FATE OF DECONSTRUCTION
1. Nothing Fails Like Success (page 11)
2. Rigorous Unreliability (page 17)
3. Is Writerliness Conservative? (page 25)
4. Gender Theory and the Yale School (page 32)
5. Deconstruction, Feminism, and Pedagogy (page 42)
PART TWO: SIGNIFICANT GAPS
6. A Hound, a Bay Horse, and a Turtle Dove: Obscurity in Walden (page 49)
7. Erasing Panama: Mallarmé and the Text of History (page 57)
8. Teaching Ignorance: L'Ecole des femmes (page 68)
PART THREE: POETIC DIFFERENCES
9. Strange Fits: Poe and Wordsworth on the Nature of Poetic Language (page 89)
10. Disfiguring Poetic Language (page 100)
11. Les Fleurs du Mal Armé: Some Reflections on Intertextuality (page 116)
PART FOUR: OTHER INFLECTIONS OF DIFFERENCE
12. Mallarmé as Mother (page 137)
13. My Monster/My Self (page 144)
14. Metaphor, Metonymy, and Voice in Their Eyes Were Watching God (page 155)
15. Thresholds of Difference: Structures of Address in Zora Neale Hurston (page 172)
16. Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion (page 184)
Appendix to Chapter 7 (page 201)
Appendix to Chapter 16 (page 205)
Notes (page 213)
Index (page 223)